ESC #57 – Ageing Studies Course

The course will offer an overview of ageing studies with an insight into the theory as well as literature and culture in English it sustains. It will advance the understanding of the ageing process across life-span and its expression in different genres such as life-writing, poetry and fiction. The ESC in AS will interrogate the cultural articulations of ageing and old age in relation to other critical categories such as gender, social status or sexual orientation and introduce the participants to scholarlily approaches to the study of age, grief and ageing. Whereas longevity, especially female longevity, has been the new reality, it is still dependent on the economic interests, fear, unrealistic expectations as well as frank limitations of medicine. And yet, older women and men have been constituting a creative hub that may be of undeniable importance in these difficult, pandemic-ridden times when we, more than before, search for new words, new spaces of belonging and new directions. Using literary and cultural texts, we will map out literary and cultural gerontology: older womanhood and manhood, as a fertile and urgent field of study for our present times.

Program:

1. Introduction to literary and cultural gerontology
2. Women and aging: feminisms and femininities/Women and ageing: feminisms and femininities
3. Men and masculinities/Men and ageing: masculinities
4. life-writing
5. Memory, the body and identity
6. Aging in English-language literatures/Ageing in literatures in English
7. The Bildungsroman and the Reifungsroman/The Buildungsroman and the Reifungsroman
8. Ageing in different cultures / Aging in different cultures

Dates: May 18-19, 2022
Organization: CEAUL/ULICES/FLUL
Trainer: Zuzanna Zarebska
Location: School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon
Schedule: To be defined

Contact hours: 12 in 2 days
Total hours: 14: 12 + 2 hours of reading and working from home